[The Medicaid card] pays for medicine—whatever pills a doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a federal disability program known as SSI. . . . If you could get a prescription from a willing doctor—and Portsmouth had plenty of them—Medicaid health-insurance cards paid for that prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street.

According to the article, 1 in 5 males between the ages of 25 and 55 is on MedicAid.

The reason Conservatives oppose Government-as-the-solution-to-every-problem is not because we hate poor people. It’s because we have the ability to recognize patterns and understand the reason for those patterns. And one persistent pattern is that when Government gets involved in social engineering, it makes every problem worse. And our understanding of this problem is that bureaucracies do not exist to solve problems, because doing so would negate the reason for their own existence and then all the bureaucrats would lose their power and jobs. The imperative of Government bureaucracies is to perpetuate and exacerbate problems so they can grow their power.

The terror attacks of 9-11-2001 are an excellent example. They represented a massive failure on the part of our intelligence agencies and security apparatus to protect the public. These same bureaucracies were rewarded for their failure with massive increases in funding and power; not a single bureaucrat lost her job, and the worst of them — Clinton crony Jamie Gorelick — went on to play a role in the financial collapse of 2008 while becoming a multimillionaire in the process. Public education is another example; the more it fails (as measured by our dismal test scores compared with other industrialized countries), the more money it gets.

To be conservative is to have the wisdom to understand that when you reward failure, you get more failure. Whenever possible, we should rely on people who actually want to fix problems, not make a career out of worsening them.